Authenticity displaces imagination in the Young Vic's Container

A lack of faith in imagination? Amber Agar, Abhin Galeya and Hassani Shapi in The Container. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

In the full heat of summer, a visit to some London theatres can be akin to sitting in a shipping container for an hour or two. The Young Vic is the only one allowing its audience to do exactly that. Clare Bayley's play, The Container, which won both a Fringe First award and the Amnesty Freedom of Expression award when it was staged at the Edinburgh festival in 2007, crams both audience and performers into a hot metal box.

The size of the container, by necessity, limits the size of the audience. The actors perform in the narrow strip between our seated knees, their faces illuminated by torchlight beams. Bayley's play attempts to show what it is to be human cargo, to be smuggled into England in order to start a new life. (Expectations are high: one girl believes she will get a job at Buckingham Palace.) The play's director, Tom Wright, says "the heat, darkness, smell of sweaty bodies and claustrophobia will make the experience real enough". Authenticity is the issue here: this is what it's like, the play says, to be trafficked across borders, constantly fearing discovery.

It gets off to an effective start, as you grope your way through the dark to the raw wooden boards on which you sit. There are frequent references to excrement and vomit, to the inevitable human stench of bodies in an enclosed space. There is the bug-eyed bark of Chris Spyrides's Turkish agent, demanding yet more money from his charges, his voice laced with menace. There is the sense of profound desperation and the different ways in which people deal with it. The relentless tension of the production is, if anything, enhanced by the constant drum of rain on the container roof.

However, when a character asks about a noise outside, what we actually hear (apart from the rain) is people laughing and having fun outside the Young Vic bar. While the production is harrowing, it also conforms to certain expectations – and one suspects that the people who see The Container will know most of what it tells them already.

With productions such as The Container and Look Left Look Right's The Caravan, the aim is to create empathy and make the audience think outside themselves. But there is something about the literalness of staging plays in this way – in a real container, in a real caravan – which speaks of a lack of faith in the audience's capacity for imagination and in writing's ability to transport.

Part of me thinks that theatre can and should be freer. Ben Richards's Cargo, staged in 2005 at London's Oval House, also concerned asylum seekers. It wasn't a great play, but it conveyed a similar back-of-the-truck desperation without actually being staged in the back of a truck.

One of the reasons that the Young Vic's Kursk was so successful is that the production doesn't set out to depict the submarine disaster, but instead shows the minutiae of the lives of British submariners in nearby waters. My imagination was able to do the rest. Kursk left me moved and tingling with adrenaline; Bayley's play, although powerful in its own way, mainly left me feeling as if I'd been sitting, well, in a shipping container for an hour.